GOG just released a "Whale Rock All Games Bundle" today. This is in addition to still keeping 3 of their games as daily deals, which they've done for the past month.

Most of the purchase cost of a game goes to the game's creator. This makes it trivial to have fake "verified owner" review. Since WRG has 90% off sales, it costs them less than a dollar to manufacture a rating and review. Most of the reviews on their games both 4+ and less than 4 are verified. We are the Dwarves, their most reviewed game has 56 reviews, and only 5 are not verified.

The best thing to ensure a good purchase is to verify a review by watching gameplay video and video reviews. Most of these games are very low effort cash grabs and that is extremely obvious in video. They're the equivalent of an "artist" splashing paint on a wall and then writing an essay on what it means. The ones that they've put more work into like WatD are riddled with bugs that video reviewers mention frequently.

Going back to the verified review issue, the pattern I showed in the graph is very strange. Not just on a site where people rarely review a game, but even on those that review frequently. How many people review multiple games by a developer on the same day, even exclusively. Something extremely rare happening to most of a developers reviews on all 15 of their games is way too coincidental to be legitimate. Even more so when there's so much similar activity within very narrow date ranges I also showed in the graph, like how many of these accounts reviewed PolyClassic: Wild on March 15 and how a newly created one reviewed every other one of its 5 reviews on WRG games that same day.

The two biggest issues relevant to reviews on GOG are:

1) How easy it is to manipulate reviews including verified ones is proportional to how much it costs versus how much is earned by doing it. The more legit reviews there are compared to sales, the harder it becomes. People on GOG rarely rate and review games, so it is easy. Most of the reviews for every one of WRG's games aside from We are the Dwarves is from a suspect account. For some games it's all of the reviews. This makes it easy to manipulate ratings and reviews. WatD has the most suspect reviews, but there were even more legit reviews, making it both their most reviewed game here, but also the only one that is less than 50% suspect. Some of WRG's games have 100% suspect reviews. It's still possible to heavily manipulate reviews on other sites, but it's tied to how much it costs versus how much is earned by doing it.

2) GOG doesn't seem to have any automated systems to detect review manipulation, and doesn't seem to care even if it does occur. They've been promoting WRG on the front page over the past month, and continue to do so, including the "WhaleRockGames All Games Bundle" they just released. GOG also regularly promotes games that have been long abandoned by developers, entirely, or only on GOG. There used to have a curator-like system where users could make publicly available lists of games, and these lists would appear on relevant store pages. In addition to putting a user's reviews in one place, and allowing them to recommend similar games, they also used it to show what games where abandoned, what games lacked features including language and OS support that they had elsewhere, and what games were made in a country, and whatever else. Then one day GOG just dropped the feature.

It's dodgier than that - it was released on the 15th, but all of the individual games' were taken off sale (many on the 14th), which meant the individual games' pages showed the full price without showing the "lowest price in the last 30 days" comparison.

They're back.

"Daily deal" for Cyberpunk SFX / Dofamine (after the last "daily deal" from 3 days ago, which was: Cyberpunk SFX / Dofamine)

GOG is complicit here - no action, no response, no mechanism to stop these fake reviews.

(Directive (EU) 2019/2161) Section 47:

Well, that's all and good, but instead of empty saber rattling, why not be more direct? If you think GOG/CDPR are in violation, have a man in a well made suit send them a particularly strong letter.

If someone uses Ublock Origin active whenever possible and don't want to see those games in search results, I was cooking up some filters yesterday, and those seem pretty good for hiding their titles: And yes, it's probably much shorter and reliable to create an userscript/style script that uses GOG's API to filter titles developed and/or published by them. Sadly, I don't know how to make userscripts nor how to deal with API.

edit: had to break the links because GOG's forum's formatting is still pretty bad. Remove the spaces in the links for the filters to work.

A few of these have new reviews posted on GOG on August 8th. The review of We Are The Dwarves is a copy of only the "pros" part of a review posted on Steam by Flameshroud. Here it's been labelled as 4 stars, compared to the "not recommended" of the original.

The rest of the original review is this: The same GOG user has also posted a 4 star review of Dofamine, for which the original on Steam by "sb_prime" is "not recommended" and includes "filed for a refund" along with

Whale Rock "games" bundle on sale again...still no comment or action by GOG.

Today's deal of the day...Whale Rock "Games" bundle.

Fake reviews, poor quality products, and commercial tie-ins with GOG...wait, are we talking about Whale Rock Games or Amazon? I'm confused now.

Thanks for the uBlock s̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶ filter. It works great. WRG has another upcoming game so just to add it to your s̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶ filter:

gog.com##a[href=":upward([class="ng-star-inserted]https://www.gog.com/en/game/heavy_burden"]:upward([class="ng-star-inserted"])

This thread is as relevant as ever, if not more so with the current sale.